Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:55AM
from the end-times dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On 3 February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) issued the remaining five /8 address blocks, each containing 16.7 million addresses, in the global free pool equally to the five RIRs, and as such ARIN is no longer able to receive additional IPv4 resources from the IANA. After yesterday's large allocation (104.64.0.0/10) to Akamai, the address pool remaining to be assigned by ARIN is now down to the last /8. This triggers stricter allocation rules and marks the end of general availability of new IPv4 addresses in North America. ARIN thus follows the RIRs of Asia, Europe and South America into the final phase of IPv4 depletion."

Years back, my boss got a whole class C for a company with ~5 employees and network footprint nothing more than one website. Maybe they can get some of the corporations with class As to give some back? (yeah yeah I know)

Relevant quote: "Remember our conclusion from the cartoon of one person per square meter; we concluded that zero population growth is going to happen. Let’s state that conclusion in other terms and say it’s obvious nature is going to choose from the right hand list and we don't have to do anything—except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list. Or we can exercise the one option that’s open to us, and that option is to choose first from the right hand list. We gotta find something here we can go out and campaign for. Anyone here for promoting disease? (audience laughter)"

In this case, fortunately, it's extremely unlikely that violence and death will occur as a result of this specific resource exhaustion, but the study of human behavior in response to the resource shortage is telling.

We've been aware for years that zero IPv4 address availability is going to happen. It's absolutely certain. The only way to make it not happen, or not *care* that it happens, is to do something about the problem. But of course, even for such a technically manageable problem, humanity on the whole chooses to do nothing. The exact same thing will happen for fossil fuel exhaustion, arable land exhaustion, etc.

And now nature will choose for us from the right-hand list of IPv4 exhaustion: here comes corporate greed, lawsuits, slow and inconvenient CGNs (one bad actor in your ISP's network causes you to be banned from the services you use), etc.

Humans are hard-wired to be reactionary, not proactive -- and at that, only reactionary to immediate problems. "Oh, I can't get a new IPv4 address. What do I do?" or "Oh, I can get a new IPv4 address, but it's too expensive. What do I do?" -- These are the kinds of things we will start thinking about, and making people start to care. NOT "Oh, we better deal with this problem that is likely to happen in 5 years."

As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.

It didn't matter whether it was last year or next...IP usage was accelerating into the wall anyway. The GOOD part about this is that now the US is out of addresses certain parts of the Internet industry are more likely to take IPv6 seriously.

Sadly, ISPs in other parts of the world have proven adept at further avoiding the problem by downgrading consumer connections to carrier-grade NAT, so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.

We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.